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A court in Magdeburg, Germany, convicted five men of sedition Thursday for throwing a copy of Anne Frank's Diary into a bonfire last year at a community party organised by neo-Nazis.

The men were each handed a suspended sentence of nine months' imprisonment. The court in Magdeburg also convicted the men, aged 24 to 29, of insulting the memory of the dead. Their lawyer said they would appeal.

The Summer Solstice Party last summer in the small town of Pretzien caused uproar in Germany after it was revealed that the town mayor and police were also present and saw nothing wrong in the burning of the book and a US flag amid applause by torch-waving neo-Nazis.

Local policemen claimed they had never heard of Frank.

Frank, a Jewish girl who died of typhus fever in 1945 at the age of 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, is a figure of hatred to Holocaust deniers because of her compelling story of life in hiding in Amsterdam before her capture by the Nazis.

Denying the Holocaust is punishable in Germany with up to five years' jail as sedition.

Judge Eicke told the accused that burning Frank's book and calling it "alien" was the same thing as publicly approving the Holocaust.

"You insulted Anne Frank's human dignity," he told them. "That is overt racism." He said the bonfire was an echo of a public burning by Nazis in Berlin in 1933 of books they intended to censor.

The director of the Anne Frank Centre in Berlin, Thomas Heppener, welcomed the ruling and praised the judge's "spectacular speech" to the accused.